MUSICAL PROGRAM
Four evenings of this year’s festival will be devoted to music (Wednesday 26 Oct. to Saturday 29 Oct.). Concerts start at 9:30pm at the Soul Music Club’s new home in the Workers’ House. Grooving atmosphere: Kubátko, DJ J-KID, DJ selektor Eurotel; rock, fusion: Happy Hours, Swordfishtrombones, Radimova kapela Karel; alternative, rock, funk: a Dictone, LU; hip-hop, rap: Moja reč, IdeaFatte.
AUTHOR READINGS
Author readings will take place in the festival café (yurt) on Masaryk Square. Reading from their works will be, among others, Mária Ferenčuhová, František Lízna, Vít Kremlička, Ivan Matoušek, Jaroslav Formánek, and Ivo Vodseďálek.
LABORATORIUM
A new addition to the festival this year is the Laboratorium inside the Vysočina County Gallery on Masaryk Square. The Laboratorium’s focus is on visual and audiovisual works that go in search of personal aesthetic paths without losing touch with the everyday physical world in which we live and its documentary or archival representations. This year’s exhibition looks at two motifs: reading the landscape and the topology of housing. Photographs, screenings, and artifacts/tools reflect the openness of the landscape, the endless structures of the city, or the well-defined space of the intimate world: Michal Kindernay has put together a sensory audiovisual tool and given it control over recording his daily existence, while Filip Cenek works with static scenes of personal memory, which he interrupts through text that sometimes flows in harmony and sometimes acts as a counterpoint to the images. In one of his series of works, surrealist Jan Daňhel uses photography as an imprint of a literary text. In another series, he enlarges inconspicuous details in the background of photographs in order to show us the home belonging to the author of controversial images found on negatives discarded on children’s playgrounds.
The Laboratorium is not a typical gallery exhibition – it is the off-screen program for the “Fascinations” experimental film section. The moving images play with reality in various ways, using different formal methods; they are screened at particular times, encouraging the viewer to return in order to see the next day’s program.
8. DOCALLIANCE The New Deal for Feature Documentaries
Doc Alliance is the result of a creative partnership of five key European documentary film festivals – CPH: DOX Copenhagen, DOK Leipzig, IDFF Jihlava, Planete Doc Review Warsaw, and Visions du Réel Nyon.
The aim of Doc Alliance is to support the diverse nature of documentary film and to increase audience awareness of the fascinating possibilities of this genre, which often manages to be more moving than the world of fiction. Doc Alliance represents a dynamic platform offering filmmakers and producers alternative forms of distribution for films that are often difficult to get onto the market. The purpose of Doc Alliance is to help documentary films reach as many viewers as possible, and to systematically support their distribution on the festival market and through its website, DAFilms.com.
Activities of DOC ALLIANCE:
• DAFilms.com is Doc Alliance’s online distribution tool. The website offers Video on Demand and permanent access to more than 600 documentary and experimental films. Audiences and film professionals from around the world can legally watch all the films at DAFilms.com; for a small fee, they can view the films directly on their computer or download them in AVI and DVD format.
DAFilms.com offers a selection of contemporary documentary films from around the world, with an emphasis on European cinema. In addition to offering notable recent films, the website also functions as a film archive of important past documentaries. DAFilms.com includes works by masters such as Ulrich Seidl, Christian Frei, Jørgen Leth, Peter Mettler, Jay Rosenblatt or Helena Třeštíková, winners of European Film Award such as Sound of Insects or Oscar nominated films such as Burma VJ, as well as films by new talents film or film students.
Every month, DAFilms.com expands its catalog with the addition of 20 new titles chosen by the five partner festivals involved in Doc Alliance. The films are selected on the basis of strict dramaturgic criteria, with an emphasis on their social and aesthetic value and signature style. The website is open to all innovative approaches, including progressive or provocative documentaries that stimulate open dialog between filmmakers and viewers.
DAFilms.com invites directors, producers (distributors), and students to register their films, thus offering them the possibility to make use of this unique distribution channel.
Our collection also contains seven unique documents of British documentary school and Free Cinema movement, including the films of John Grierson, Robert Flaherty and Karel Reisz, originated from 30th to 50th of the Twentieth century. Legendary documentary films such as “Night Mail” and “Mother would not allow it”, are, even today, constantly sought after. These films from the archives of the British Film Institute, are now exclusively available for a free streaming only on our site.
• Doc Alliance Selection is an annual selection of five films that Doc Alliance considers exceptional and worthy of special support. Each of Doc Alliance’s partner festivals chooses one film, and all five selections are then presented at all five partner festivals. In this way, the films receive attention and support on five national markets, thus facilitating their future road to audiences through their distribution in cinemas, on television, or on DVD. At the end of the year, an international jury presents the “Doc Alliance Award” at one of the allied festivals.
In 2011 the Award will be handed over during the CPH:DOX Copenhagen. The Five national markets support the films at their festivals and in their theatrical, TV and DVD distribution.
Selected Films:
Brother Sister
A story of chosen affinities, on earth as in heaven. It begins with the filmmaker’s memories of his brother, who died at a young age; he then focuses his attention on his aunt, who became a nun after having a premonition about a mystical Spaniard with an odour of sanctity; she works tirelessly for his international recognition. It is a personal reflection on the fine line between material and spiritual freedom.
Gunnar Goes God
The filmmaker senses something lacking in his well-off bourgeois life. Seeking peace and spirituality, he leaves for Egypt to visit early Christianity’s first monasteries. Hoping to find an answer to ease his anxieties, he asks everyone he meets there questions about existence. Thus his journey evolves into a search that blends serious devotion with an off-beat sense of humour.
Olda
A retired elderly woman who suffers from memory loss, Olda roams untiringly around her house: she thinks about her son, talks to her dog, complains about “damned capitalism” and how it reduces life to money, she drinks beer, prepares meals, takes medication . . . but her primary activity is filming. She films herself as she lives her life—a last stand against the oblivion that approaches.
Sira - Songs of the Crescent Moon
The Sira is the most important epic poem in the Arab world. For centuries, from generation to generation, its five million verses were passed on orally from one lyricist to the next. Today only one oral performer remains, a 75-year-old illiterate Egyptian; he would love to teach it to his grandson, who, however, is tempted by modernity. A portrait of the contradictions that give life to modern-day Egypt.
The Good Life
Two women, a mother and daughter, who live on Portugal’s southern coast. They have had a happy existence, never having to work a day in their lives. But now the days of prosperity are over and they must deal with all of life’s material difficulties to survive. After years of dreaming, their nightmare has begun. A human comedy with brilliant dialogues befitting a likeable and refined documentary sitcom.
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